i abandoned joysticks almost twenty years ago. i briefly tried a sidewinder for this game but thought better of it quickly.

Yes, I am an A-S-S.

I am welcomed in the home of ravens and other scavengers in the wake of warriors.I am friend to carrion crows and wolves.I am carry me and kill with me and die with me where the road ends.I am not the honeyed promise of length of life in years to come,I am the iron promise of never being a slave.

Mouse and keyboard here with keybinds for pitch up (spacebar) and rudder (Q and E). M+KB rudder is wonky as hell, but still usable in some situations.

If your trouble with joystick is with turret (something I've not tried), keep in mind that turrets have 100% aim assist and you don't actually need to "aim". You just put the aiming circle over the enemy you want to shoot and press the trigger. You'll hit the target.

Thrustmaster T.16000M FCS since a couple of days, before that (3x) Logitech Extreme 3D Pro ...

Turret works fine, I also use keyboard there ; A & D to swerve a little to make it not too easy for the fighter on my six.

Mouse/kb has one advantage ; you aim with the circle and get a better view of your target. With joystick you aim with your plane, sight is static. But maneuvering with joystick is better (more natural).

So how do you do so well with a mouse and keyboard? Many people here are hit or miss with their chosen setup. I do ok with a joystick. But I can't usually figure out the best way to fly to target the enemy plane. With a mouse it seems easy to fly towards the enemy target but as if you have less control over the plane in doing so?

Can you please tell me how to setup keyboard and mouse flying correctly and I will try that.

I use Mouse and Key. And as a result have a kludgy set of keybinds. But they work for most of what i want to do.

I have thought hard about joystick when i upgraded the machine to something that actually runs the hd client with no issues.But balked at the price.

Spoiler

The quality seems to follow the "You get what you pay for" mentality. whether its $30 for something 'disposabley plastic' and barely enough control controls to single fire individual weapon groups let alone basic throttle control (the last bit costs extra) to something that covers all the basics with room for some extra stuff for 2 or 3 times the price. Which you can still break when you pull on it to hard or get pissed at a bad game.
and then mostly nothing else.
At that point if you want even just a little bit more you only option is to go ALL IN and the price jumps into the middle triple digits for a setup from Thrustmaster that is sturdy enough to attach to a 3 axis flight simulator and has sufficient force feedback to control a fly by wire airplane.
(I would not recommend that last bit. Just because you Can do a thing doesnt always mean that you Should do a thing.)

but im still on the fence about it 6 months later.

At this point switching to joystick will mean having to relearn how to play the game.
And from what i hear you trade off more difficult target aquisition for being able to take manual control of all flight.
which is only better than the games auto pilot if you actually have some hours in the logbook.

Or an order of magnitude of that time ... Simulated

Edited by wylleEcoyote, 31 July 2019 - 02:45 PM.

Fair warning. My success rate at speculative guesswork is on par with my WinRate. Hit or Miss.
I start on the right track and then sometimes make a weird left turn and get lost in the weeds ...

I switch back and forth depending on what the current RSI is on this old chassis.

M&K I find more usable because you can look around the aircraft as opposed to the more rigid sight lines invoked by the stick. Still, sticks are fun especially if you bind a load of different tasks to the hat. Back to check 6, forward for nearest target selection, right for sniper, f'rinstance, all in under one second.

I use Dvorak keyboard layout so its the direct equivalent of stock WASD.

I actually have almost complete stock layout other than a bunch of non-basic keys I never rebound so they're off in inconvenient parts of the keyboard/were over-written by my basic config -> never use them, I even still have Automatic flaps & 100% roll/level-off rate

Less flippantly:

Actually it is pretty much just move mouse cursor onto enemy, mash boost till in range, then mash fire until enemy dead, repeat

There are other things like I've always been good at judging lead offset, sometimes I manually pre-roll knowing I will be turning a particular direction, using certain moves to get on target more easily vs just following a target (I don't even know proper names for a lot of aerobatic moves), certain tricks of eeking out max-speed, pulsing fire to manage gun heat, keeping an eye on the map, judging when to take evasive action & what moves, knowing if I should be able to turn with the enemy or if I have to boost/climb/dive away if I don't kill/cripple, knowing when to bail if the enemy boost/climb/dives away or if I can successfully chase.

IMO a lot is in choice of target, choice of which cap to head for, when & why.

As it happens, I actually spotted my old Sidewinder Precision 2 in a box yesterday so I hauled it out, played around a bit with it in a Training flight getting settings working then started a live battle.

And now I wonder how the hell people manage to score even moderately well with Joystick

The loss of situational awareness is huge, feels really weird having camera stuck to bore-sight, getting even vaguely on target is real hard.

Swapped back to Mouse/Keyboard and felt immediately much better, managed to salvage a 2nd best score on my team & did some meaningful work toward the Victory.